John T. Bennett (@BennettJohnT), Defense News. Leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee are in the preliminary stages of crafting legislation intended to restrict access to sensitive classified data by private-sector contractors after the Edward Snowden leak scandal. Contractor Booz Allen Hamilton employed Snowden when he used his access privileges to download and release a large amount of information on classified programs to the media. While months away from any kind of legislation, the plans have the potential to dramatically change the business models of the large number of intelligence contractors that have grown exponentially since 9/11. Of course,…

Nick Taborek and Tony Capaccio (@acapaccio), Bloomberg. Hewlett-Packard has won the long awaited award for the Navy’s Next Generation Enterprise Network over a team led by Computer Sciences Corporation valued at up to $3.5 billion through 2018. The contract is the largest single information-technology project in the federal government and will manage the service’s 800,000-user intranet. HP teamed with Lockheed Martin, IBM, AT&T and Northrop Grumman on the effort which allows it to continue running the Navy’s IT backbone as it has since 2008. The contract has gone through several modifications through the process as budget cuts and competition have seen the…

Dion Nissenbaum, (@dionnissenbaum) Wall Street Journal. The hits just keep on coming with the continuing saga of former Booz Allen Hamilton contractor Edward Snowden and his massive theft and subsequent leaking of NSA secret programs. Among the twists this week is the revelation that the federal contractor that conducts 45% of all of the background checks for security clearances, Falls Church, Va. based USIS, has been under investigation for a year for contracting fraud. The company that was formerly part of the US government before spinning off in 1996 and is now owned by private equity firm Providence is accused having a…

Robert O’Harrow, Jr., Washington Post. It was a rough week for the National Security Agency with a first leak in the Guardian that the agency has been collecting all of the meta-data on calls over its system then in the Washington Post on tapping into internet service providers called PRISM. Sunday it was revealed that both document releases were the work of a single Booz Allen Hamilton contract employee of NSA named Edward Snowden, a 29 year-old IT specialist who claims access to scores of Top Secret documents and hints of more revelations to come as…

Andrea Shalal-Esa, Reuters. Copies of the 2013 defense budget started getting to the press over the weekend and the early reports have a 7.5% drop in the procurement budget and an overall 12.2% drop from last year’s budget with the drop in war funding. Generally aircraft and ship programs fared well while cuts in the medium family of vehicles for the Army went down substantially, and the Humvee upgrade program was killed in favor of the JLTV.